'Structures and Styles' of Hartford Architecture

This article, by Kevin Flood, first appeared in the Journal Inquirer newspaper of Manchester on April 14, 1989.

"Structures and Styles: Guided Tours of Hartford Architecture" was out of print in 2010 but available in some public libraries.

So, you think you know every square inch of Hartford.

All right, where's Little Hollywood?

Hint: It's in the west end off Farmington Avenue.

Give up? It's a row of brick apartment buildings along Owen Street, supposedly given its nickname as a tribute to the beautiful young women who moved in there when it opened in the 1920s.

Stop to look at the buildings some day, and you'll notice their unusual mix of architectural styles—one has a slightly Moorish design while another echoes the Tudor Revival.
Gregory E. Andrews and David F. Ransom throw the spotlight on Little Hollywood and 500 other examples of Hartford architecture in their book, “Structures and
Styles: Guided Tours of Hartford Architecture.”

Published by the Connecticut Historical Society and the Connecticut Architecture Foundation, “Structures and Styles” highlights everything from downtown's Old State House to the trendy Comet Diner on Farmington Avenue, from pressed brick apartment buildings in the South End to Gothic churches in the North End.

While the book covers all of the expected landmarks, like the Colt Armory and the Travelers tower, its ultimate value lies in the attention it lavishes on dozens of lesser-known and even obscure buildings.

“One of the things we hope to accomplish is to give the reader some awareness of buildings that he's been walking by for years but just hasn't looked at,” Ransom said in a recent interview.

Those brick offices with the unusual twin towers at the corner of Elliott Street and
Wethersfield Avenue, for instance, form the edifice of a 100-foot-deep trolley barn built in 1903 for Hartford Street Railway Company. South End residents of the 1940s knew the barn as an arena for boxing matches and dances.

Downtown, on Market Street, St. Paul's Church squats in the shadows of Constitution Plaza and Main Street's former department stores, the only evidence left of the poor but vibrant immigrant community that once occupied the city's riverfront.

And on Washington Street, situated among car dealerships and nondescript state offices, sits the Samuel N. Kellogg House, a relic of Washington Street's mid-19th century glory days as “Governors Row.” Mansions lined the street then, with giant, leafy elm trees shading them in the summer.

Andrews and Ransom pull buildings like those out of Hartford's landscape, providing a photograph of each one and a few paragraphs outlining its history and architectural style. The effect is like looking at 500 postcards.

With about 1,000 copies sold
since it went on sale in December,
the book seems to have stirred a
lot of memories, Andrews said.
“We've been really impressed
with the number of people who
have identified with the buildings,” he said. “They'll come up
to us and say they recognized a
building, or that they grew up in a
building in the book—some
personal attachment that makes
the book very meaningful to
them.”

First of its kind

Perhaps the most striking thing
about the work—considering
Hartford is more than 350 years
old—is that no one had published
anything like it before. “Many
cities have a book of this
character, so the void in Hartford
was fairly obvious,” Ransom said.

“It was something that each of
us had thought about for a long
time,” said Andrews, a lawyer
turned architectural historian.
The real spur for the book, he said,
came when a friend visited from
Washington D.C. “She said, ‘Where's the book on Hartford
architecture?’” he recalled. “We
had to admit there wasn't one but
that we'd fill the gap as soon as
possible.”

As veteran preservationists, Andrews and Ransom already knew
many of the buildings that would
eventually wind up in the book.
“It's the sort of information you
accumulate over a period of
years,” Ransom said.

“I don't think you could just go
into a town and write a book like
this in two or three years—which
is how long it took us to write this
one,” he added.

Photographing 500 structures
and writing about them takes time
and money. The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and the
Howard and Bush Foundation
helped supply the first in the form
of grants, but neither the authors
nor the historical society will
make any money on the book.

“The historical society will be
out of pocket on the deal, and I
think that is a contributing factor
of why it hasn't been done
before,” Ransom said.

11 neighborhood tours

Once they started working on
the book, Andrews and Ransom
divided the city into 11
neighborhoods, so readers could
take tours of each one. “Then each of us
went around driving, looking as
carefully as we could, to choose
the 40 or 50 buildings that we
thought would be appropriate and
representative for a tour,” Andrews said.

Fine architecture wasn't the
only criteria for deciding which
buildings got into the book. “We
also tried to pick the buildings that
we thought were significant to the history of the city,” Ransom said. “We tried to pick a range of styles, a range of building types, and a range of locations.”

“Certainly, many buildings that
don't look like palaces can have
considerable architectural and
historic interest,” he added.

Examples of that, Ransom said,
are what's left of the workers'
housing built in the Parkville
section of town during the late 1800s.
“These houses are not handsome,
but they represent a row of
workers' housing, which is what
that community was about back
then.”

Andrews and Ransom outline
Hartford's architectural history in
a narrative chapter at the end of
the book, showing how the
city's changing architectural
styles reflected the economic,
social and technological forces
that swept through it. They note,
for instance, that the Old State
House faces the Connecticut
River, not Main Street—an indication
of how heavily colonial
Hartford relied on river commerce.

Unfortunately, the Old State
House is one of few buildings left
from Hartford's earliest days,
Andrews said. “I think it's fair to say
that Hartford is comparable with
other cities in quality and kinds of
buildings, but it perhaps has fewer
18th-century buildings than many
other cities of its size and age in
the Northeast,” he said.

One reason for that, Andrews
said, is that there weren't many
buildings back then to begin with.
“Hartford in the 18th century was
a comparatively small place—smaller than such cities as
Newport,” he said.

Also, Ransom said, colonial
Hartford was doomed by its own
success as well as its location along the
riverfront; the early cluster of
houses eventually became the
downtown business district, so the
old houses were replaced.

“One thing Hartford is
fortunate in having is a wealth of
19th-century brick buildings—probably, I think, more than other
city in the Northeast, because it
grew up so much in the 19th century,” Andrews said. Examples of
it, he added, are the rows of apartment
buildings constructed for
factory workers in the Frog
Hollow section, which includes
Capital Avenue and Park Street.

Looking toward future

Despite its historical emphasis,
“Structures and Styles” is
anything but musty. The current
downtown office boom, though
still on the drawing boards in
some cases, leaves a big imprint
on the book. CityPlace, State
House Square and other towers
built downtown over the past 10
years receive treatment, and the
narrative chapter at the end contains
a diagram of the proposed
59-story Cutter Financial Center.

Andrews and Ransom give the
boom decidedly mixed reviews,
however. They note in the book
that it includes no new apartment
buildings and that the city's retail
sector “has achieved a tenuous
stability,” always under threat of
replacement by office space.

And of course, there is the
threat to architecturally significant older buildings. For example,
preservationists fought to save the
19th-century Goodwin Building,
but the developers of a proposed
office building and hotel on the
site agreed in the end to incorporate only its facade into the
new building's design.
“That its highly ornate facade
was saved, while the fine interior
was destroyed, was a hollow victory,” Andrews and Ransom write.

One good side effect of the office
boom—from a preservationist's point of view—is a growing
appreciation for the remaining
older buildings throughout the
city, Andrews said.

The best example of that, he
said, is the state Capitol. “The
state has spent a lot of money to
restore it to its original glory,” he
said, recalling that its architectural style once provoked “dismay
and dislike” among many people.

“It was old-fashioned, out of
style, fussy,” Ransom said.
“There wasn't a good word to be
said for it.”

“A lot of people called it Disneyland North,” Andrews remarked, adding that it since
seems to have come back into
favor.

Despite some disappointments,
today's downtown boom seems
more tempered by concern for
preserving significant older buildings than the redevelopment drive
of the 1950s and 1960s, Ransom and
Andrews said.

That period saw the construction of interstates 91 and 84, the
latter claiming the Gothic old
Hartford Public High School on
Hopkins Street. Also, the
dilapidated East End disappeared
beneath Constitution Plaza and I-91, taking
with it what Andrews called “a
wealth of old buildings.”

“At that time, Hartford needed
revitalizing, economically,” Ransom said. “I guess we feel
that the revitalizing could have
been done a little more sensitively,
with a mixture of good old
buildings and new ones.”

“Let's say that the city is much
more sensitive than it used to be
and that there is a greater awareness about the need to save historically and architecturally
significant buildings,” Andrews
said.“The role of the Greater
Hartford Architecture Conservancy has been vital in that.”

“At least now there's some dialogue,” Ransom added. “We don't always win, but at least there are some discussions.”

Editor's notes: 2 Amid the recession of the early 1990s, plans for the Cutter Financial Center were shelved. 3 The architecture conservancy filed for bankruptcy in 1997; it has been succeeded by the Hartford Preservation Alliance.